


your name, a pale ghost

by halbeshaus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Memory Loss, Minor Violence, Secret Snarry Swap 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:28:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21632935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halbeshaus/pseuds/halbeshaus
Summary: After an accident at work, vast swathes of Harry's memory are gone, but one seemingly inconsequential, fragmented memory haunts him. Three years ago in his mother's kitchen, he met Severus Snape.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Severus Snape
Comments: 33
Kudos: 87
Collections: Secret Snarry Swap19





	your name, a pale ghost

**Author's Note:**

> A massive thanks to everyone who had to cope with the short-lived, but increasingly weird version of this fic that had a donkey as an integral character. May that draft never see the light of day. Thanks to Cithara for giving this a once-over.
> 
> Prompt No. 42 from pluperfectsunrise: In a world where Voldemort never existed, Severus never taught at Hogwarts. When they finally meet, Harry falls in love with him at first sight.

"Even your name  
is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again  
and again, it will not stay with me."  
— _Miles Away_ , Carol Ann Duffy

"This is the worst pain a man can have: to know much and have no power to act."  
— Herodotus 9.16, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt.

~

The first time wasn’t in his studio, or even in one of the few and far between interdepartmental meetings. He never attended them, as it turned out. Or if he did, he was in the back, the last to arrive, first to leave, so that it was as good as him never being there at all. What was the point of him being there if he was never there to be seen?

I saw him in the narrow back corridors of the gallery. He was little more than a shadow slipping past me, a steaming mug of tea balanced on a stack of books, a slice of toast held between his teeth.

It wasn’t worth fixation — his concentrated frown, his craning neck to see the path ahead, to avoid tripping as he neared the stairs, the faint hint of tobacco that trailed him, that stained the air long after he was gone. He had angled himself away, I hadn’t seen him properly. There must have been thousands of men in London — half of them wizards, no less — with dark hair and stern faces.

It meant nothing that I had dreamt a man just like him in my parents’ kitchen, nothing at all that this was as much mum’s gallery as it was Slughorn’s.

Fog spilt from my brain. It pooled around me, lingered on the edge of my vision. He was the singular slither of doubt that emerged from it.

~

I had a job that day — one barely worth the effort — to deliver a file that could have waited till the next meeting if it weren’t for my mum’s pitying smile. I was a glorified intern, unpaid, stuck here until the pity wavered, was replaced by something less well-intentioned.

I’d seen almost everything the gallery had to offer, from the public exhibits to the private offices, even down to Special Collections, but I’d never ventured beyond it. I’d never taken that last flight of stairs into the basement, never followed the dungeon-like corridor to the door marked:

_Conservation and Restoration_  
_S. Snape_

The name was an indent marked in metal. It was cold to the touch.

Inside, a studio that smelt of paint and solvent, packed with large work tables and cabinets. A desk was crammed into the far corner, piled with neat stacks of parchment and books. Magic rolled off the false windows and charmed lights, and gathered as a dull pressure behind my eyes.

That same man from before leant over one of the tables, his dark hair gathered at the base of his neck. He scraped layers of grime from a canvas stretched flat beneath him. He had one of those muggle things in his hand — a scalpel, I think — and not his wand.

He didn’t pause working when he spoke. "Leave it on the desk and go." His voice was the ghost of someone I had met before.

His hooked nose was sharper in this harsh studio light, the shadows under his eyes washed out, his hands clean.

"You…" I tried and failed to say.

He was no figment of my spell-addled imagination. He was alive, peeling the damage time inflicted from the portrait of a boy. His indifference to me didn’t change the fact of his existence. No new memories stirred. The past three years remained absent as I watched him, but, deep in the fog, a light revealed itself, calling me.

Those lost years were bookended by memories of Snape.

~

Time distorts all it touches with a smoke-stain. A milk-white haze designed to disorientate, making ghosts out of the things you love and falsehoods of the known. Memory dies in spell-light, an uttered charm that makes time seem like folly.

Before you, a fractured, fragile thing remains, milk-white fingers rising from their graves.

A severe, hook-nosed man appears in the doorway, a rush of emerald flames licking his boots. A horrible smile stretches across his thin lips.

_Ah, the prodigal son. I had wondered when your father would let his guard down._

He sits enthroned at your mother’s kitchen table. A tendril of hair falls over his face as he scrawls on the inside cover of a book.

— A dusty, sun-bleached book, the same colour blue as the jumper he wore, that you long to touch, long to peel away as the world around you dissolves into a darkened bedroom —

His magic is static sharp under his skin. One accidental touch is enough to undo you.

_So you don’t forget._

The book is yours now. Warm from the Floo. Warm from his touch.

…

…

…

Later, his wand lies beside yours on your desk. He’s crumpled in the chair, dark shadows beneath his eyes, the corners of his mouth drawn down. His listless magic fills the room enough to drown you both.

You struggle to reach for him, to soothe the wounds, but you find you can’t. Your eyes are half-shut, your arm is strapped to your chest.

A shadow out of view stirs him.

_There’s nothing I can do for him._

Your bruises will fade with time, your bones will fuse and heal, but some of the injuries you carry are not made to scar over with the course of time.

~

A week later, another file in my hands, another journey into the depths of the gallery. My thoughts had returned here so often it was as if I’d never left.

I caught him — Snape, the name a burden I’d yet to say aloud — on his lunch break. The discarded crusts of a sandwich crumpled up inside wax paper. A carbon print of the painting he’d been working on lay in front of him, decorated with cramped notes.

He eyed me as I placed the file on his desk and settled on a stool.

"I’m perfectly capable of reading that without supervision." His tone was flat, matching the bored look on his face. He wasn't wearing robes, but a muggle shirt and trousers, with a jumper pulled over top. Not that inky, mottled blue one I had dreamt him in, but black, the same shade as his eyes.

"I spoke to my mum about you." I paused. He offered no reaction. "Apparently you’re friends."

He huffed. "Is that what she called it?"

"She said…" In truth, she had said little. Slytherin. Friends at school. Only passed Potions because of him. Don’t tell your father.

The words I needed were beyond me. How to spin a rush of thoughts, a series of half-known, half-felt emotions, into speech. _I dreamt of you when everyone thought I was dead. It was you I saw — no-one else — just pieces of you. And your jumper. When I look at you, when I think of you, my sternum, some intangible depth beneath that, aches._

I’d never met him before. He’d think me mad.

"If she sent you down here to beg for a quick fix, then you’re wasting both our time."

"I didn’t come down here to ask anything of you."

"Didn’t you?" He considered me, a long finger tracing his thin lips. "Legilimency. Lily mentioned nothing of the sort?"

I shook my head. "She asked you to try, right? That’s why you were by my bed." He stiffened. "Only, I thought I’d made that up."

"A fool’s errand. Nothing more. It is the polite thing to do when your friend’s son miraculously awakens after accidentally Obliviating himself."

"I didn’t accidentally do anything."

He sneered. "The details are irrelevant. I’d no desire to rifle through the empty mind of an Obliviatee." He jerked to his feet and busied himself at his easel. "I am a man of my word, Potter. I will not do it."

This Snape was no ghost. He was far too abrupt, far too changeable to be anything of the sort. He mixed colours with fervour, held each slightly differing shade up to the portrait in comparison before accepting or rejecting it.

I should have left, but once again I found myself enraptured. His magic was deliriously warm, a silver hum that encompassed the studio, coiling itself around me — or I around it.

The damage to the painting was significant. The canvas had been slashed in three and patched back together, leaving large areas of the original paint gouged out. Both eyes were gone, as was half the neck, and the sitter’s hand where it posed on his chest. Snape would turn those ugly blank spaces into what had laid there before. His only guide, as far as I could tell, the carbon print on his desk. A colourless, vacant shadow of the original.

He calmed as primitive shapes of fingers began to form. He made no comment on my presence. His shoulders were stiff.

~

You appear as a statue, frozen to the spot, your fingers itching to touch. The inlaid stones that form your eyes were lost long ago, but you find a way to watch him. He crushes ginger beneath a silver blade and adds it to a simmering cauldron.

 _Drink this._ He ladles the potion into a goblet. _Make your choice._

The dusty, sun-bleached book he gave you is tossed aside. Its pages read inside out.

~

I woke up to a burning throat. I had another day ahead of me, another blind world to confront, but it paled in comparison to the need to drink.

In the bathroom, I turned on the cold tap. I ducked my head into the sink, cupped my hands to redirect the flow, and drank. Water seeped into my eyes, struck like ice on my cheeks, ran blindly down my neck.

I drank until I too had turned cold, until my stomach began to roll, until the ache that settled inside me was indistinguishable from nausea.

My dream dispersed into morning. I remembered Snape: torchlight turning his face into a skull, a goblet extended out to me.

~

I arrived at the gallery earlier than usual, two hours before it was due to open. My dad, ever the dedicated Auror, was still out on a raid, and Mum was starting the final push to ready a new exhibit. I'd no choice but to come in — being left to my own devices was beyond me. I hadn't regained the trust I'd lost in April by shutting the cat in the cupboard under the stairs.

April. That first awful month _after_ , during the same week my fingers wouldn't grip my shoelaces, on the same day I'd asked after Regulus only to learn he had died.

It was September, a full sixth months had stretched between then and now. My family thought me an invalid.

It had stormed the whole week straight, but this morning was grey, the only hint of rain the smell of ozone on the tarmac. I liked mornings like this, when it was early enough for the sky to be stained pink, before I could shake the sleep from my body and convince myself to feel something.

The gallery roof was perfect for moments like that. I'd go up there when the slog of menial tasks had run dry and I didn't fancy another afternoon bored stiff on the sofa in Mum's office.

Go up there, there where it was silent, devoid of office life and well-intentioned tourists. Stand atop a metal vent. Stretch out your arms, feel the cool breeze in your hair, grazing your cheek, the scent of flowers from the nearby park.

It was the closest you could get to flying in the heart of London. We were the only wizarding building in a mile-wide radius. The dampened noise that filtered through the Muggle Repellent Charms only added to the sense that you were weightless, flying above it all, with some great distance between you and them.

Because there is a distance between you and them.

When I went out onto the roof that morning, I found I wasn't alone. Snape was leaning on the wall, facing out over the sea of muggle shops and flats, smoking.

It was too early to talk. Too early to pretend I'd any idea of what to say to him. I left a foot between us. My back against the wall, the cold bricks dug into my elbows.

I'd looked out once, the way Snape did now. It had been senseless. There was nothing to be gained from looking.

His hair was damp, freshly washed, somehow lanker clean than it was unwashed. The change of scenery didn't alter him, he was the same shadow on the edge of my vision. But time slowed him, stole his mind while he woke. He'd yet to speak since sleeping, yet to eat, I could tell from the rise and fall of his chest, the colour of his smoke-stained breath.

This was the closest I’d got to seeing Snape separate from this place. The closest to knowing the man who’d appeared in my kitchen, the man who’d survived _Obliviate_ , the weight of whose magic had burnt through the spell and thrived despite my memory. And yet, only after seeing him had I known the absence he had left — though what it was that remained to be filled, I didn't know. There were three Snapes: the one in the kitchen, the one by my bed, and the one I stood beside now. Each of them trapped in time, each impossible to understand. I knew little of any of them, and when I tried to see one in light of another, I knew even less.

In the space of three years, something had irrevocably altered him; it had twisted him from a casual cruelty and left a skeleton in his place, cheeks gaunt, wrists narrow. This one, the one I'd been staring at for too long to pretend it an accident, was, somehow, a recovery of them both.

It fell on flat ears. "I think, if I wanted to, I could make histories out of you."  
Tendrils of smoke rose like a shredded curtain between us. "Histories. What a horrible thought."

"Oh, I dunno. It wouldn't be that bad." A car horn blared some muffled streets away. "I want to figure out the you beneath all that aloofness." I want to unwrap you, to unwind the strings that hold you together.

He stubbed out his cigarette and flicked it onto the pavement below. "You're too busy constructing an enigma out of something bland. If you wish to know me, then by all means try." He shot me a look before peering over the wall, as if recalling his half-smoked cigarette. "Damn well try for a change."

One more lingering glance at the pavement and he pushed away, left the roof in favour of the gallery, the door propped open behind him.

I stood where he had stood. The wall digging into my ribs the same way it must have done his. There was nothing of interest in the city, certainly nothing worthy of capturing Snape's attention.

I ducked inside, followed Snape's echoing footsteps though he himself was nowhere to be seen.

~

I always thought it a bit stupid when people who’d gone through something terrible described their lives as being split into a ‘before’ and ‘after’. I didn’t have any choice but to believe it as I sat in my childhood bedroom, my life — my old life — a wall of boxes before me. There was a person who existed, a version of Harry Potter who had lived three years that I had not, that is now dead to the world. Murdered in a backfired _Obliviate_.

I’d been left in his place, irreparably damaged, trapped in my — _his?_ — childhood bedroom that had quickly become his grave. A distance of miles separated me from that stranger version of me.

A terrible distance. I saw it reflected in Snape, too.

He was a seascape of changing tides. At once a figure enthroned and one slumped in my folding desk chair. He was the indifference of that portrait he laboured over. The filth he scraped from it.

He had thought it important enough to look at me twice. But how often had I thought of him — how many times had I made him see me? Three times in the memories I had of him before; a thousand more when I imagined it. His dark eyes misshapen, the angle of his nose wrong enough to put to bed any illusion of him being real. Yet I drank that illusion in, alone in my bedroom, night after night.

The concept that my thoughts could be spoken, could turn fantasy into reality overwhelmed me. And yet I couldn’t say it. I could barely bring myself to think it. It hurt too much — the ache beneath my sternum swelled when I turned to it. But I could avoid it. I could lessen the intensity by letting myself skirt around every thought I had of him. So I made him look at me, but at the same time I turned from it. Shielded myself from the true weight of his not-gaze. His face half-thought, a nose and eyes the wrong side of being right.

I could never say what I could have said because it was never something I wanted to do. I wanted it to be spoken, I wanted it to be known, but I didn’t want to be the one to speak it into existence. I wanted it to happen without it having happened, without bearing the responsibility or being the cause for what was to come. I never could speak. Never would, either. It was beyond my capabilities. Beyond anything I could possibly have desired. (And everything that I did desire when no-one was looking.)

It didn’t untangle him from my mind. It didn’t undo what I’d imagined.

But on the rooftop, Snape had seen me. If only for a moment. Hardly long enough to count it as having had seen. That flickering gaze, that sideways glance, the inability to look at me in favour of his discarded cigarette — I had bled with the weight of it. And by doing so, he had invited himself to be known.

I needed to move, even if just to wander aimlessly through the fields until it was light again. Anything to be away from this room, away from thoughts of him, thoughts of him looking right at me.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave, just as I couldn’t speak.

My wand was under my pillow. I hadn’t touched it in months lest another spell backfire, lest another Healer hide their mocking pity in a smile. Lest I fail to cast anything at all. But perhaps, as no-one was watching, perhaps now I’d be able to.

My parents would be proud of me — wouldn’t they? — if I did something after long months of nothing. Their son who conquered all odds, who did what no-one thought him capable of doing. There’d be no mention of the gallery, no hint from my father that maybe I’d do better there, without Thicknesse critiquing my every move.

I grabbed my wand. Holly and phoenix feather. It sang under my touch. If I spoke, if I so much as thought _Lumos_ , a blinding light would bathe my bedroom, bright enough to spark beyond me, to be seen miles away.

My magic clamoured within me, my heart raced, the spell rolled off my tongue, a whisper.

A bead of orange light fizzled. As small and intense as a lit cigarette. One later stubbed out on a wall. That moments before had found a purpose, filling lungs with smoke. Had made a curtain fall.

I brought it to my mouth, saw myself reflected in the black window. Wand held aloft. My face another’s. I looked ridiculous. I shuffled over so that my wand, the orange bead, was flat against the windowpane. My forehead on the cool glass.

The room was a stranger’s; steam rose off boiling cauldrons. I was unrecognisable. My cheeks were fuller, my hair unkempt as it always had been, but purposely so, not from lack of care.

My eyes were the same. My wand, too.

" _Nox_." I snuffed the light. It made little difference. My bedroom was just as dark, the night just as endless.

~

Snape carved a hand from the abstract, careful not to sully the boundary between new and old paint.

He hadn't acted any different since I'd found him on the rooftop. In fact, I think he cared for me even less. I'd searched for him there. I'd gone up there again, countless times, searching, but was unable to find him. Not that I was looking for him. Not really. The only place I saw him was in his studio, his back to me, or his eyes on another face, his focus obscured by that portrait, or a file I or someone else had delivered to him. It was a double-edged sword: I could watch him without the fear of him watching me back, but when he was working he would hardly speak.

He hadn't spoken on the rooftop, either, but I'd managed to go beyond the little he had given here. The few words he said had found me closer to him. I'd see him cast in a different light, a cold shade of pink. The sun — real, alive — enveloping his face.

I'd known him more fully then, than I had the whole time I'd spent down here.

Here, where you'd be wrong to think that there was no magic in what he did. Magic wasn't always about the immediate results of incantations and wand-work. It could be subtle, could be an undercurrent, hardly obvious, as you laboured over a potion. Snape's brush was his wand. He wove a spell into the canvas with each deliberate application of paint.

His voice cut through the illusion I had built of him, half dream, half this. The line between the two divided further.

"If you'd like to prove your incessant hovering useful, my tea's on the desk."

I'd been half asleep in his desk chair while I watched him. I lifted my head, the cover of a textbook I hadn’t read peeling off my cheek.

"It's gone cold," I said. The milk had settled into scum floating on the surface. "Where's the kettle? I'll make you a new one."

"You're a wizard, Just" — he flicked his wrist — "warm it."

For once, I wished he hadn't been the first of us to speak. "I don't mind, really."

"You'll have to go upstairs. Health and Safety dictates: no departmental kettles."

I did exactly that. There was a staff kitchenette two floors below my mum's office and I knew it well enough. Snape's old tea washed down the sink, the mug rinsed out while I waited for the water to boil.

I'd overfilled the kettle. The extra minute it took to boil was a torture that I spent pacing a half-circle on the carpet. But time was kind to me, eventually. The kettle clicked off. Steam condensed on the underside of a cabinet.

I brewed a red label tea from the red and blue muggle shop across the road. I suppose I thought Snape, with his eyes set for muggle things, would like it. Maybe he'd been the one to stock the cupboard with it. After all, that painting he was working on looked muggle enough. The sitter immobile, blindly staring out, a white mask for eyes.

I returned to the basement and set the mug on the workbench nearest to Snape. In my absence, he'd started working a black-jewelled ring onto the portrait's middle finger. I'd expected him to go back to feigning ignorance, the tea I made going cold in the process, but Snape set his paintbrush aside and swivelled to face me.

"You have your wand?"

I hesitated, unwilling to answer, but something in his expression compelled me to speak. But something underlaid his bored expression and compelled me to speak. "No."

"What use is a wizard without his wand?" His arms were folded across his chest as he waited for my reply. He’d chosen to look at me, now, when it was the last thing I wanted him to do.

"I reckon about as much use as me with one."

"Am I to believe," he said after a moment, "that you’ve lost your magic?"

I smiled despite myself. "I wouldn’t say lost, exactly. It’s just a bit out of kilter at the moment. Memory Charms — you know how it is."

His eyebrows shot up — a break in his impassive facade — but he didn’t say what he must have been thinking. _Obliviate_ , no matter how addled it left you, wasn’t enough to outright kill your magic. It wasn’t something that could so easily be destroyed.

"Humour me." He stood up, drew his wand from his trouser pocket, and handed it to me. "If you’d please."

Snape’s wand was as useless as my own. No. It was worse. There was no spark of magic, no inkling of a spell. Heat rose in my face as I fumbled it. Snape hadn’t lost his cruelty after all. It was there insidious within him, had waited until the right time to reveal itself.

Snape’s hand was on mine. His palm atop the back of my hand. His fingers wrapping around my own. He aimed the wand up, away from his work. It was too much already — he was cold — his touch burnt — but I sank into it, let myself become an extension of him until the time he saw fit to discard me.

" _Avis_." The word was soft like the yellow birds which fluttered into life. His magic a continuous hum that pierced my knuckles. There were five of them, circling a dusty ceiling lamp I’d never had reason to notice before. They settled onto the candle holders.

His grip tightened, the tendons in his hand flexing. There was no warning for his second spell. The birds shrank in on themselves. Their feathers smoothed into nothingness. His magic melted through my palm, rang true like silver. In their place were candles, wicks half-burnt, hardened wax where their beaks had been.

His hand cold on mine. Magic silver. That ache inside me — he had lessened it. He — his magic which melted through his palm, his racing pulse pressed against my wrist — had filled that space beneath my sternum, filled my lungs with memories of him.

"They were never alive," Snape said. "Impossible for it to have hurt them."

He was all nose from this angle. Tufts of lank hair hung like curtains. His eyes black. I could have sunk into all of him if he’d given me the chance to. His magic could have become me.

"We work well together." I didn’t rise above a whisper, unwilling to break what he had the calm that had settled. "Your magic. Me a conduit for it."

He dropped my hand. Fell back into the workbench. He’d got paint on me, had bruised my knuckles a muddy shade of pink.

"That’s a very dangerous thought." He wiped his hand and the remains of paint on his shirt. "Very dangerous indeed."

"Doesn’t make it any less true." He was unravelling now. That physical recoil not at my touch, but at the sound of my voice.

"Don’t be an idiot." He rubbed his wrist, that spot where his pulse had strayed. Sat back in his chair, defeated, a mirror of the man who’d once sat by my bed.

It dawned on me, then, what it was that I had seen before, and what it was that I saw now. He was stilted, reserved, yes, but it wasn’t down to indifference towards me. It was anything but indifference — if that had been it, he wouldn’t have reacted like that. He cared too much, beneath the display of indifference he put on, for it to be true.

"What are you so afraid of?" I handed his wand back to him. "I can’t do anything to you. You’ve got all the power here."

The air began to shatter. The horrible smile he’d worn in my kitchen crawled back into life. "You have some sense left, then. It is exactly that of which I am afraid."

~

The darkness is endless. A damp corridor stretches out before you. Thicknesse is hot on your trail.

— _he shouldn't be here, he has no right to be here, departmental audit or not_ —

A minor inconvenience, nothing more. Muggle Repellent Charms malfunctioned. A few unfortunates stumbling into where they shouldn't.

They're in front of you, Healers tending to their scrapes. Not bad enough for St. Mungo's.

You kneel in front of them one by one, wipe their minds clean of the wizarding taint. One more once over by the Healers and they're on their way.

 _See._ You turn to Thicknesse. _A One man job. Everything's working as it expected._

 _There's another._ Thicknesse grits out. _A tough one this time. A test of your will power._

~

I didn't venture much into Special Collections. I passed by the entrance every time I went to see Snape; it was the last door before the final descent into his world. But I never paused. I never dropped in to say hello to Lupin or the touch-too-intimidating French girl who worked alongside him.

I didn't have to, as it turned out.

Lupin came to Mum's office one Wednesday before the clock struck twelve. He found me on her sofa, wrapped up in my cloak, not-reading a book about Durer's lesser known wizarding brother.

He smiled a warm, pleasant smile. First at my mum, then at me. Unchanged since I had seen him last.

"Fancy lunch?" he said only to me.

He pulled me away from the gallery, changed the scenery from the drab staff kitchenette into a park. The cold washed away as I sat on a park bench, but Lupin gave no hint at having cast a warming charm. He unpacked two Thermoses and passed one to me.

"It's nice here, isn't it? Certainly makes working in the city all the more worth it." As if the park wasn't damp and grey, with bare trees and cracking tarmac paths. "Eat up, it won't hurt you. Dora made your favourite."

Dora. The word was empty. A metallic tang as blood pooled in my mouth.

I'd almost begun to think that I'd run out of things to have forgotten. But apparently there was a world full of meaning, full of stuff that I was meant to know but was unable to cling to. It had meant something, once.

I couldn't eat. I didn't leave the gallery during the day. When I arrived and left it was by the top step, Mum's hand (sometimes Dad's) on my elbow to Apparate us there and back.

"Teddy's been asking after you," Lupin said. "He doesn't understand why his favourite uncle hasn't been over to see him."

Nine months at least since I'd been anywhere other than the hospital and home, there and the gallery.

"I'll come round soon." I had no intention to.

"Shall I tell him that, or will it only work to get his hopes up?" It wasn't meant to injure, Lupin's smile told me as much, but it dug at me even so.

Crows called overhead, invisible amongst tree branches, shadows on telephone lines.

"Mourn the life you lost, by all means. It's perfectly natural. But try not to let it consume you. Try not to let Teddy bear the brunt of it."

"'m not mourning."

"Aren't you? Wandering about your house at night, refusing to eat" — he indicated my untouched lunch — "withdrawing from the things you love...Struggling with even the simplest spells..." He had the decency to look guilty. "Your parents worry, whether you realise it or not. And they speak, but only to those close to you, only—" Only to him, and Sirius, and the Weasleys, and everyone else I did or didn't know. Maybe not Draco, though. "They're concerned you might be slipping."

"Doesn't feel like concern." They were the ones who kept me inside. Who made certain I couldn't wander off — the charms on the windows and doors at night, the Floo Powder locked away, the wards on the front gate. I was never alone, never able to exist without them hanging over me. The closest thing I had to freedom was the silence of the gallery, but even then, the security officer at reception wouldn't let me by if I tried to leave. Snape's studio was freedom, in a sense. Freedom enough for me to exist and for him to pretend that I didn't. The rooftop, as well, but that guise of freedom was even more of a prison than I had hoped it to be.

"Yes, well." Lupin's voice was soft. Everything about him was so suffocatingly pleasant that I couldn't hate him. I didn't want to, either. "I understand why you'd feel that way — better than most, I should think. Who else do you know to have faced a similarly drastic loss of self?" He gave a wry smile. "Nevertheless, if having me as a father does no other good, then Teddy will at least have the patience to understand if you're not quite yourself. Right. We should get back before Fleur reports us missing."

Lupin walked slower on the way back. His movements stiffer. The moon had been and gone two days ago, his bruises were still healing. The cold, maybe, made things worse.

I faltered outside the door to Special Collections. The stairwell to Snape an unformed thought dampening the air.

Lupin noticed. His hand hesitated on the doorknob. "See much of Snape?"

"A bit. Delivered some stuff for my mum." I was there only yesterday, watching him work, watching him pretend I hadn't begged his magic from him. "He's alright, I guess."

"Isn't he just." He sounded distant, momentarily separate from himself. His gaze lingered on the stairs. He shook whatever bothered him away. "You should finish your soup. I'll know if you haven't. He paused, fingers twitching. "Say hello from me the next time you drop in on Snape."

~

“When we first met,” I said, back watching Snape from my place in his studio, “you gave me a book.”

Snape had finished the portrait’s hand and had started working on its left eye. It was beginning to look less like the damage it had undertaken and more like the painting it used to be.

“I tried to figure out for the life of me what it was, but it’s not ringing any bells. I thought maybe you’d remember.”

“Of course I remember,” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat. “But I see no reason why it should matter.”

“It seemed important enough at the time.” Enough, at least, to mark the divide between that half of myself, enough to seep into my dreams and infect me with thoughts of him. Thoughts of him and me. That, I couldn’t say out loud. “Everything about you seems important.”

His paintbrush slipped. Flesh coloured paint muddied a blue eye.

Snape winced. “The infamous folly of an Obliviator; you see importance in memory when there is, in fact, none to be found.” He summoned a bottle — solvent, from the smell of it. Wiped the stray fleck of skin from the eye with a doused cotton swab. It took the underlying colour with it, the layer of paint he had painstakingly built up to give shape to the iris and pupil, imbuing them with life.

He was impervious to me, but already he had faltered; I had seen through him once before. I knew his act by heart, that his indifference was a lie that he told to himself. If he ignored me, I'd fade away, leaving at the end of the day with his life going unchanged. And I'd be none the wiser as to why he was so determined to dispel me from him. Who knows, I might back down rather than continue failing at prying anything from him.

But he had made a mistake in looking at me and asking — out of frustration, admittedly — for me to do exactly this. I was acting out of my own self-interest, but it wasn't as if it went against his wishes. Besides, I had seen both too much and too little of him. I couldn't walk away, could only wind myself further around what I had found of him.

"You can be a right bastard, you know that?" My own words took me by surprise; I hadn't meant any malice. "I don't expect it to mean anything, but that's not why it matters. It's just — do you get how frustrating it is? It's like everybody but me is in on this massive secret or whatever, and it keeps slipping their minds that I'm not in on it too. So I come down here, and I see you, and I know I know you, and that you know me too. But despite that, despite how much I want to, I can't — there's no way for me to figure it out. Not without you giving way. So even if it's nothing, it's important because it happened. And if you keep pushing me away, I'll just keep pushing back." I was left ragged, surprised at the depths of my resentment. My frustration at now knowing, at every person I knew who'd brushed me off, had come bubbling forth. I'd said more to him now than I had the whole time I'd known him.

"Are you quite done?" Snape spat out.

I nodded, unable to do anything else. Too embarrassed by the suddenness of my outburst.

Neither of us moved. The distance between us stretched out into an enviable gulf.

"I'll go then, shall I?"

Snape ignored me. He appeared to be done for the day. He threw his dirty brushes in the direction of the sink. Set aside his palette.

I was at the door when he called out behind me. " _Transmutations of the Soul_." The words came as if ripped from him. "It was my annotated copy. You were willing" — a surge of water rattled in the metal sink — "and eager to learn as much as you could. You intended to be the Ministry's most proficient Obliviator."

 _Transmutations of the Soul_. I remembered it barely. The Latin epic that had marked the turning point of research into memory charms. Key reading for any Obliviator who took himself seriously.

"Did I manage it?" I asked. Fleur's voice floated down the stairwell, clouding before me. I closed my eyes, leant my forehead on the doorframe, clearing out all the world bar Snape.

"If what I know is true, then you were the best."

~

A file waits unopened on your desk. It unfolds with the touch of your wand, the sound of your voice. Files aren’t your usual way of working. Normally things aren’t organised so far in advance.

 _Revelio._ Words appear, the specifics of the case, followed by a blurry photograph.

 _You’re joking,_ you say.

 _Now, now._ Thicknesse’s grin is all teeth. _You have aspirations. It’s high time you see what it is you’re aspiring to._

You don’t need the photograph to recognise your task — the name is more than enough.

_Immoral, isn’t it, to have a department dedicated to Obliviating muggles. I find the less desirable among our kind are often as deserving._

_What’s he done to deserve this?_

Thicknesse laughs. _Does he need to have done anything? No, you see_ — he steps forward, taps his wand on the parchment and sets it alight — _it’s what he might yet do. It’s about what he has been seen to do._ His glee settles into something colder. _You can’t back out. Think of that the next time you aspire to something above your station._

~

I unpacked my trunk on a Saturday. I brushed away the dust which had gathered on top. Out of everything I owned, all the parts of me I couldn't parse, those seven years at Hogwarts were the least concerning. But I started there, where my mind began to give way if only a little.

I was twenty-five. My childhood shouldn't have felt like an apparition.

A school scarf. My fifth year Prefect badge. A crumpled note from Draco complaining about Weasley and another from Ron saying much the same about Malfoy. Mouldy Potions ingredients. A half-eaten, decade old pack of Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans.

Seven years of textbooks piled up by subject in a circle around me. I remembered learning, and late nights writing essays in the common room with Draco sulking beside me. Trips to the library to see Ron and compare — copy — notes with Hermione.

I remembered learning spells, their incantations like rote work. Exactly how to flick my wand. How to calm the storm inside my mind and channel my intention.

If I'd forgotten anything it was very little. There was no reason I shouldn't have been able to make my magic work.

No reason other than the one Lupin had offered. But he wasn't right. He couldn't have been. If I was mourning I'd have known it. I resented not having my past, suddenly being one person separated from another, but that resentment didn't make me damaged, did it? No-one was there when the spell backfired. No-one could say for certain that I hadn't tried to — that I hadn't managed, accidentally, to botch up the part of me that could speak truth into a spell.

It was caged up inside me. Restless. An unpleasant itch on the back of my ribs.

My Potions textbooks were different from the rest. Their covers beaten and peeling, far beyond the scratched state of those for my other subjects. The pages were dog-eared and torn.

The title page of every one held a different name than my own:

_Property of Severus Snape._

A familiar cramped handwriting decorated the pages. Less so in the early years, but by third year ingredient lists were annotated, whole steps of recipes were blacked out and altered.

My own words began to join the fray sometime in fifth year. Nothing near Snape's level of expertise. More like bored doodles or highlighting one of Snape's snarkier comments as _helpful!!_.

He wrote spells in his youth. Took a shadow of a name and wore it like a cloak around his shoulders. The Half-Blood Prince. It had lasted a year.

I'd forgotten this part of my adolescence. The part I'd apparently dwelled on for seven years. I had practically grown up beside him. As I ran my hands over the pages where his handwriting met mine, it flowed clear. How many nights, exactly, had I worshipped these words? And how many days had I spent between classes learning them over and over until they melted under the heat of my tongue?

The fog that had gathered in my mind gave way to sparks of not-quite memory that had, so far, evaded me. I'd sat at the top of the hallway stairs as a teenager, and possibly even as an adult, listening as Snape and my mum talked downstairs.

And at twenty-two, I'd waited at the foot of the ladder that led up to Mum's brewing room. A face had appeared in the doorway before me. Followed by flames. A vessel, finally, to carry the voice I'd spent years overhearing.

I bowed my head to Snape's copy of _Advanced Potions Making_ and breathed it in. Stale, musty pages. The acrid hint of a potion gone wrong. Snape. Downstairs in the kitchen. Holding out his sun-bleached copy of _Transmutations of the Soul._

 _So you don't forget._ The words amalgamated, twisted out of all reason. His magic a fire spreading through me, sinking deep inside, burrowing into that place beneath my sternum, into what would become the ache that I now carried.

I shoved aside my Charms and Divination books. Cleared the patch of floor that lay above the hallway Floo. I stretched out over it, my cheek flat against the cold floorboards, my heart pounding, my glasses knocked askew.

Snape's voice rose like coiling smoke through the narrow gaps in the floorboards. I felt exactly the spiking heat once cast by emerald flames.

I had known Snape my whole life without realising it. That absent part of me — that wound that gaped — it had been him.

I drew in a shuddering breath, my eyes blurring with tears, mouthing the words I felt for him into the heat of the floorboards. Knowing he felt nothing for me.

~

_I'm sick of it._ Where the ceiling should be, there is only the charmed image of the summer sky.

 _Sick of what?_ he asks. His hand smooths over the marks he left on your sternum.

You try to put life to the resounding, nausea-like pain in the back of your throat. But you're not certain what you're sick of. The sound of rain? The long winter nights? But it's almost spring, that shouldn't bother you much longer. How can you say Thicknesse's name aloud when it would break everything you have built.

_I'm not sure. My mind's been all muddled lately._

_The infamous folly of an Obliviator._ You can hear the fondness behind every syllable.

That's one thing you have in common, though even there you're opposites. You work to find memory and destroy it, while he savours it, protects his own from prying eyes, works to decipher what he can in others.

 _Whatever happens_ — a sudden desperation overcomes you — _I need you to promise me something. I need to know that you won't try and fix this for me._

His hand stills. You can feel the absence already. _I am a man of my word. I won't do anything should you not ask for it._

~

Knowing was worse, I thought. I couldn't go back to Snape's studio. At least before, in my ignorance, I could watch him, unknowing.

But the idea of sitting in a room with him now, unable to say anything, unable to touch, unable to have what wasn't mine to have — what was wrong of me to want to have...I could have drowned in it.

I'd been an idiot. No wonder he'd been so stilted with me. He'd dealt with me before, had likely witnessed my adolescent infatuation already. And all this time I'd forced him to sit through my discovering it all over again.

Even my parents noticed something was different. They exchanged glances over the table, worse than their usual ones, knocked tentatively on my door to check on me if I hadn't appeared in a public space for a few hours.

They sent Lupin one evening. He smiled when he saw me. As pleasant and warm as he always was. I didn't have any choice but to follow him outside into the cold night when he asked me to. He Apparated us away, his hand on my shoulder.

We appeared on a dark, cobbled street lined on both sides with brick houses. Some with their windows boarded up. Others starting to crumble where they stood.

"I thought you might like to get out," he said, leading us down the street. "It's not a social call by any means. I won't force Teddy on you just yet. Another time, I think."

"Where are we going?" My words condensed in the air.

"I have to collect my potion. It's far too difficult to brew by myself." He approached the last house, the only one with any sign of life inside, and gave the door a sharp knock. "I'm thankful, then, that I know someone willing to do it for me."

The door opened to reveal Snape caught in the doorway.

"You're late," he said, distinctly not looking at me.

"Yes, well. I'm here now." Lupin patted Snape on the shoulder as he brushed past, paying no attention to Snape's flinch. "Harry's parents called in a favour. I'm sure you won't mind. We'll be out of your hair soon enough."

Lupin disappeared into the back of the house, leaving Snape and me alone. He glared at me before storming off to find Lupin.

The hallway was dark. I had only the murmur of their voices to keep me company. I didn’t feel comfortable wandering off to find somewhere to sit, or at least, somewhere that I’d feel less of an idiot standing and waiting. The living room was through the closed door to the left of the staircase, but I didn’t think Snape would appreciate it if I made myself at home. Wherever they were, wherever I was, it didn’t seem strange. It didn’t feel as though I’d never been there before. But then, nothing about Snape felt unvisited. When I’d read his Potions books, a pit had settled in my stomach. When I sat in his studio, it was awkward, yes, but it didn’t feel wrong. I didn’t feel out of place.

It was an illusion of familiarity. The hours he spent labouring over his work, his mind ticking over, pretending not to notice as I watched him. His voice ringing in my ears in the dead of night. The weight of him in my dreams. His textbooks. His house.

I saw him in everything. He coloured my every thought, clouded my dreams even more than the fog that held the world at a distance from me. In the wake of realising why — well. It was no surprise that his house, as miserable and devoid as it was, smelled like home.

From the back of the house, Lupin and Snape’s voices rose to a hushed clamour. I edged closer, just as I’d done in my childhood, desperate to hear Snape through the barricade of walls and doorways.

“You swore to me you wouldn’t!” Snape hissed.

“And I didn’t.” That was Lupin, his reassurance edged with frustration. A tone he rarely kept with me. “There’s really no need to be so upset, Severus. He came here of his own volition.” I hadn’t, actually. “He’s curious about you. He has every reason to be so.”

“You’re being ridiculous. And keep your voice down. For all I know, this is exactly as you intended.”

“I’m being ridiculous? Really? I think you’ll notice I’m not the one who raised my voice in the first place. Nevertheless—”

“Nevertheless. There is no reason for him to be here. No reason at all. Which you and I very well know. ‘Doing his parents a favour’ — how very like you, Lupin. If you think for one moment that I’ve forgotten — if you think I trust anything you say —”

“Ah, well. I hadn’t thought us friends, but I had hoped we were beyond holding schoolboy grudges.”

“A grudge?” Snape’s voice grew low and dangerous. I was glad that it was Lupin in there with Snape and not me. Glad that I’d never heard him sound so cold. So terrifying. “I’m not so foolhardy. As if I were still concerned with you and your friends…You should drink that before it goes cold. All of it. Otherwise it’s wasted.”

There was a pause. I pressed closer, fearing the sound of my breathing would give me away.

“How I manage to forget just how vile it tastes, I’ll never know.”

“You know too much.” The anger that had bitten through his words had dissipated. He sounded deflated. Defeated, even. “I have… regretted… the risk I had taken.”

“We’re well past that, I’m afraid.”

“Yes. Yes, I realise that. But,” he wavered, “you could still do it. The thought must have crossed your mind. You could still destroy me.”

It was Lupin’s turn for silence. What could he know about Snape that would have him so on edge? That would make Snape horrified by the fact that I’d come here with Lupin?

“Not once,” came Lupin’s eventual reply. “If Harry wasn’t… and if it weren’t me…” He took a moment before continuing. “If it weren’t you, perhaps I would have said something. But Severus, you must believe me, I have moved beyond the person I was at school. Injuring you would bring me no joy. Not only would it prove to hurt those dearest to me, but it would also be a grand misrepresentation of the truth.”

“The truth? You know nothing of it.” It was a whisper so inaudible I could barely hear it. I could have imagined it, the sound of his voice in my ear, as I did the look on his face when he said it.

Their conversation was over. A door creaked, somebody hurried back down the hallway. I jumped back, pretended to be enthralled by a grim looking vase near where they had left me.

Snape.

“Having fun?” A flush had spread across his cheekbones. “No doubt you’ve been enjoying yourself immensely.”

There’s no way he could have known I was listening. He cut me off before I could speak, turned away in the same movement, dug his hands into his eyes. “You are happy, aren’t you? That is to say: you’re not disappointed with the gallery? You’ve managed to find a semblance of peace there?” He spoke the same way he did at my bedside. Disjointed. Words rupturing from him before he’d had the chance to breathe.

A vile wave of nausea began to creep into the back of my throat.

“I suppose so.” I had no idea how to respond to him. He never asked anything of me, or at least, anything he had had been a demand, not something that deserved an answer. He avoided my own questions often enough. He’d never before been so direct. “I’m about as happy as I can be. It’s not the most exciting place, but I don’t mind it. I reckon I’m happy.”

All of it a contradiction. None of it the answer Snape deserved. “I like your studio. You don’t exactly expect much from me. Besides,” I grinned, despite how wrong it felt, quoted the countless words my dad had said to me, “never liked working under Thicknesse much.”

“No, I imagine not. Regulus said as much.”

I’d forgotten, never put it together before, that only a few years had separated Regulus and him. They were both Slytherins, and both ran, from what I had grasped, in similar circles. Of course they knew each other. Of course they’d been friends.

“He mentioned me?” The wave of nausea began to subside. In its place, that ache beneath my sternum began to wake.

Snape’s hand fell from his eyes. He was perpendicular to me. Ajar like the kitchen door. Out of kilter with what I had come to expect. “Rarely.” His face softened, removing any doubt I had left that Regulus was just another name to him. “He regaled with much fondness Black’s reaction to your sorting. Nothing more.”

I hadn’t noticed Lupin returning until he was already there, at my side again, making excuses, nodding at the door, indicating it was time to go.

Snape knew Regulus. They had spoken about me if only in passing. Snape had held some concept of me before I’d met him, outside of whatever information my mum had or hadn’t let slip about me. It had come from Regulus, of all people. Regulus, whose path I’d followed into Slytherin, as seeker. Who’d spent long summer afternoons practicing with me. Who’d offered his friendship, rekindled the relationship with Sirius despite the tension between them. Regulus, who’d died the same week they found me on the tiled floor of the Ministry bathrooms.

Snape. Wounded at my bedside. A pained look on his face as if already in mourning, suddenly whisked away from his home and begged to fix me.

Snape. Who knew Regulus. Whose face had warmed at the name.

I said as much and more to Lupin when we were back on the cobbled street, a stream of consciousness I couldn't recollect.

He hummed in response. “That certainly is a lot to think about. They were friends, yes, but I don’t think that was the sole reason why he was so upset.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and Apparated us away before I could ask him what he’d meant. I didn’t have a chance afterwards, because as soon as I’d set foot inside my house he was gone again.

I’d no answers. I’d come back with more questions than I thought possible. But one thing was certain. I’d been wrong before. Lupin had changed. There were lines by his eyes that weren’t there three years ago. His hair was flecked with even more silver now.

~

There is another type of execution. A lesser punishment than the Dementor's Kiss. It is there in the resounding message of that sun-bleached book you used to carry — the one you read until the words ran dry of meaning, until they were flat on your page, until the only satisfaction you could derive from them was when they were drunk with the sound of his voice — _Transmutations of the Soul._

Think of it. Memory dissolved into absolution; killing the character — the person you are —but not the soul. It is the memory that we are here to kill. It is that which makes you you.

It's reserved for the lesser crimes. For when one wants to watch their victim suffer. But you don't, do you? Your expectations have been upturned. None of this is what you wanted for yourself.

You had ambitions but they weren't for evil.

The answer lies in the goblet he offers you. You have told no-one but him.

You swallow the potion in a mouthful. Calm washes over you as it slides down your throat. Your thoughts consolidate, the fever terror subsides, until all you are left with the is the choice in front of you.

Forget and live. Remember and die.

The horror will haunt you. That you cannot mourn will haunt you further.

~

The weekend came and went. I had no reason to see Snape. I was trapped in my room, the days fading by so fast that the nights seemed endless, unmoving.

I had dreams that I hardly remembered — more fantasy than fact — in which everything revolved around dull, meandering shadows that took on Snape's face. I had his school books. I had worshipped them. I had listened to his voice ooze through the walls and rise like smoke through my bedroom floor. I had pictured him, reimagined him over and over until my mind was heavy with him.

But I'd missed something crucial. The Snape that existed in my head was out of kilter with the man I saw in the gallery. It didn't map onto the frustration that I had witnessed at his home.

Was it possible that Regulus' death had shaken Snape that much? What Lupin had said made it ring more true than I liked. I'd got on with Regulus better than his own brother had, I'd found out about his death later than the rest, but even I hadn't wasted ten months away.

Maybe Lupin was right; I'd already burnt all the energy that I could have spent mourning Regulus. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself for it to be anything other than a graze. I was already gone, already shattered, to the point that, though it tore me to pieces, what damage could it really do? One more tragedy didn't matter, no matter how much I loved him.

Unless that was it.

Love.

I'd dug my heels in. Pestered Snape for months on end, too self-centred to see what I was doing. That ache inside of me — everything I felt for Snape like a dagger sharp in my gut. If Snape had loved Regulus, it would explain everything. His frustration, his quickness to anger, his inability to trust Lupin, and his indifference towards me.

They were all the actions of someone heartbroken. In pain but unable to speak. Even more so if no-one had known. No-one but Lupin.

Snape must have thought Lupin told me, either to make a mockery out of him, or to soothe my misaligned crush. And if I had found out, what's to say that Sirius wouldn't too? I could only imagine his horrified tirade if I'd accidentally let slip what I now knew. Sirius hated his brother; the only thing he hated more were those who sided entirely with him.

So I'd stumbled on the reason behind Snape's every move, entirely by accident. It was the reason, wasn't it? Nothing else could explain it so perfectly.

That he was so important to me, that I thought my life was his, that I wanted to be his— I'd been Obliviated. My head wasn't in the right place. I'd attached myself to someone due to the coincidence of two stupid, shattered memories.

I hadn't any truth left to answer, no fragment of Snape remained for me to investigate. I had made us both up. Supplied meaning where there wasn't any.

I wanted to laugh, cry, at the thought of it. It was exactly as Snape had said I'd done.

I knew. I'd uncovered the truth. I was happy to finally have something concrete to latch onto. So, why did that slither of doubt remain? Why did I fall asleep to the concept of him?

~

The restoration was finished. The eyes, the hand, the neck, that had all been torn to pieces were seamlessly reincorporated into the surviving work.

Snape's dissatisfaction was clear. His glower deepened the more he compared the carbon print of the original painting to his own attempt at restoration.

"It looks alright to me," I said. It had been weeks — seconds — since I had seen him last, had stood in his hallway, had lain pathetic on my bedroom floor.

It hurt to look at him and to breathe the same air as him. But I couldn't resist coming down here. If this was all I could have of him — these awful hours cut off from the rest of the world — then I would take it. I'd spend the rest of my life only able to look, all too aware that he was drifting after someone else, if it were my only option.

"Anyone with your pitiable appreciation of art would think so." Snape discarded the carbon print with a groan. "It's that damnable ring. I'll have to start again. All that time wasted."

"What — erase the whole thing over one silly ring?" There really wasn't anything wrong with it. It looked just as garish as it would in any of the paintings hanging upstairs.

"Not the whole. The rest will do just fine. But in its current state, the ring only serves to detract."

There were bruises under his eyes. His hair was even more lank than usual.

I wanted to pull him away. To crawl inside his skin. To align myself against his bones, our skeletons the perfect mirror image of one another. But I stayed my tongue, kept those more twisted desires to myself, and resigned myself to watch.

He would be memory one day, and this would be all I had of him. In that distant future, one I struggled to imagine myself having, I would rebuild what I had seen here, recapture the person that I had lost.

It had been a different man who had swept into my kitchen, but it had still been him. I worshipped him then — his hurried words, his distant voice, and later what I could guess of his body — just as I did now. The two separate shadows of a man before and after the tragedy tragic death of a lover. Snape had changed, but the way I had wrapped myself around him without him knowing or caring remained the same. I had no proof of the past, and yet I knew it to be true.

I could draw parallel lines between us. I could retrace the paths that had led us from then to now.

"On the rooftop — do you remember? You said that I should try to get to know you."

"Must you do this now?" No heat lay behind Snape's words, but neither did his usual pretence of practised boredom. The studio smelt like solvent; he had already started to remove his affliction from the portrait. I failed to see anything wrong with what he had done. My eye, apparently. Not quite as practised as his.

"I told you I'd push back," I said. "Don't you want to know what I found?"

"Not particularly. But I imagine you're going to tell me anyway."

 _Look at me,_ I wanted to beg of him. _Look at me and I'll let this go. I'll never speak again. Turn around. See me as I'm trying to see you._ But he didn't read my thoughts, he didn't turn around, did nothing other than what he had set out to do.

"We're the same, when it comes down to it. I think we both lost something, and I think..." My mouth was dry. This had been a terrible idea. Only moments before I'd been content to silence, to living without knowing, but now all I needed was to pry the last of it from Snape. "I think I loved someone, maybe. And I think you did too, but I can't be certain because you're not exactly the easiest bloke to read."

He recoiled. The back of his legs hit the worktable behind him. He steadied himself with his hands. "Don't."

I ignored him. "Obliviate isn't perfect, right? Stuff can slip through. It's difficult, but it's not unheard of. You're part of that for me. The last thing I know is meeting you, and the first thing coming out of it is you at my bed." I'd told him all of this before, of course, before I'd known the depth of it. I hadn't realised the weight that lay on his shoulders, or why he had appeared so dejected.

"You're going too far," Snape said. "You're asking too much of me."

"I'm not asking for anything."

His knuckles were white from gripping the table.

"I have seconds left over from that thing between us; little pieces of you that slipped through the spell. I can't help that, but I wish I could. In fact, I wish I could remember every part of you, even if it ends up hurting me."

Snape had gone one step further than not looking at me. He'd shut his eyes. Funny, how he always seemed to run from me without ever moving an inch. Some small part of me hoped that this was his form of kindness. That he wasn't trying to ignore me, this was just his way of letting go of distraction despite his enduring reluctance. He was giving me something, his attention, as I always dreamt he would. Git.

It might have been that which spurred me on, despite all my fears of upsetting the careful balance that had built up between us by speaking fiction into fact. "So even if you don't feel the same — even if you had someone else. I know I loved you. Pretty sure I still do, actually. More than sure. That's the thing about you, Snape. There's too much of you left over that I can't do anything else but love you."

"You're not him," Snape rasped out. It slipped through me, dragged the air from my lungs. It was wrong to envy a dead man, and yet the proof was spoken. I'd followed in Regulus' footsteps my entire life, but he had had what I could never.

"When you found me on the rooftop, I thought I had reason to hope. Then you opened your mouth and said something utterly inane," Snape continued, every word measured. "I never used to go up there, but then you started dropping by between cases, under the pretence of seeing someone or other. You discovered the roof entirely by accident, and when you weren't busy slipping down here, you'd drag me up there. It took me a while to extract the reason from you, but eventually I managed. You said something just as inane. It was poetic, apparently, to be the lone wizard looking out over a muggle horizon. Neither able to fully know the other. I thought, foolishly as it now seems, that if I could only hear your voice again, I would find the rest of you waiting there. I don't know what I expected."

My mind was blank. For once, I couldn't blame the fog that clouded me for vagueness of my own thoughts. A shallow hope sparked in that ache beneath my sternum, but I tried to stamp it down. He hadn't said a name. It might not be me he was speaking to.

"You and me?" I asked.

"Is it so horrible?"

Maybe not Regulus, after all.

I took his temporary blindness as an opportunity to move closer, putting myself between him and that portrait in the process. I could have touched him, but I didn't.

He'd wrapped a blindfold willingly around his eyes, much like the portrait had been left passive by the tears through its canvas, and much like I had been so determined to see Snape that I had vitally mistaken what was there. I had seen him, but I'd never known him until this moment.

"But you're not him." Snape's voice cut me from my thoughts. "It's different now."

"Then help me remember. Show me how to become him."

He was still. Slowly, he looked at me, his expression shuttered. "Potter... Harry..." My name was whispered fervour that spilled from his lips, painted the shallow space between us. "I can't. I swore I wouldn't."

I was drunk from the sound of my name, and the solvent fumes that encompassed us. "You swore to me."

His grip on the table slackened as he leant into my voice.

"You promised me, didn't you? Whatever's missing — whatever happened — I want to know everything." When he didn't respond, I continued. "You loved me."

"Loved," he echoed. It felt bland when he said it. "Enough." The reservation fell from his face, replace with a level of reverence I had never known before. I would have given him the world if it meant he never looked away.

He reached for me. His hands clutched at my clothes, dragged me closer to him, as if the tighter he gripped, the less likely the chance I'd disappear. As if I'd ever willingly leave this: his mouth on mine, his breathless, hurried kisses tracing my jaw.

He'd loved Regulus, moments before. In speaking, I had pulled the truth from him, had turned the fates in my favour. But doubt crept up on me, edged into view — my magic wasn't strong enough, it couldn't have wrapped itself around my desperation and made it real. Magic, the feeble remnants of it I clung onto, couldn't create this.

~

Is this how I did it? Had I faced myself, the portrait a stand in for a mirror, as I turned my wand on myself, and pressed it against my temple?

They'd found me in the gents, not far from my office, slumped on the tiled floor. That's what they said, Mum, Dad, and the Healers. Even Snape had mentioned it, here in his studio.

My wand had rolled under the sink, and my magic had followed it. Washed away hours later by the same crew who came in to clean up the blood.

Had I looked myself in the eye when I did it?

It didn't make sense. In the same way that Snape had never sat fully formed in my mind. Even now, I was missing something. "I would never have erased you from my mind. Not willingly, at least. I don't think so."

"Nor I," Snape said. His words fell against my shoulder. "And yet."

The final shred of truth wouldn't come from him. He'd sooner die than speak aloud what I needed him to say.

"Do you know how frustrating it was, your coming down here week after week? Having to endure an emptier version of what we used to have. I wonder — do you have any idea how often we've done some variant of this?"

"I've thought about it."

"How foul."

"Show me," I asked. "If you're not going to speak, then at least show me. I need to know."

He raised his head, a scrap of reservation playing on his face. "You must realise the severity of what you're asking of me."

"We've come this far." If it were me he was afraid of — my reaction, my feelings towards him — he no longer had any reason to doubt. Whatever had happened to me, whatever the reason I had lost my memory, it was far bigger than I suspected. Snape wasn't the only thing I'd lost, after all, no matter how transfixed I'd been on solving him. Three years of my life, of which he was only a fraction, had been wiped clean from my mind.

"If they ever knew," he whispered, "it could be the ruin of both of us." His hand settled around the bones in my wrist. The draw of his magic consumed me, bled from his fingertips into my veins. His wand pressed into my palm. "You recall Legilimency?"

"I'm useless, remember."

"But I'm not." He brought my hand up, pressed the tip of his wand to his temple. His eyes locked with mine.

" _Legilimens._ "

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment here or at [LiveJournal](https://snape-potter.livejournal.com/3894030.html), [Insanejournal](http://asylums.insanejournal.com/snape_potter/1823418.html), or [Dreamwidth](https://snape-potter.dreamwidth.org/1151370.html).


End file.
